ha, trick question. Answer is NOTHING, obviously, because they shouldn't exist. bye everyone.

tl;dr, this is a very confused all-over-the-place article from Undisc's future employees. Gotta get them ducks in a line, browskie.

The mystique of central banksThe mystique of central banks

Kevin Warsh is trying to restore a little Delphic mystery to the Fed. After his second press conference in late July commentators described his words as “confusing”, “internally contradictory” and “nonsense”. The words are also sparser. Under Mr Warsh, policy statements have shrunk from roughly 340 words to half that or less. “Forward guidance”—language indicating where policy may be headed—has been stripped out. In June he declined to submit his own interest-rate projection and said his colleagues’ forecasts had been written in pencil with “big erasers”. He is also considering fewer policy meetings and press conferences. [...]
Yet Mr Warsh’s tight lips are less radical than they look. Until 1994 the Fed did not even announce its rate decisions; surprise was thought to make policy more effective. Then came a communications revolution.

Very neat. Less Fed-adoration and Fed megaphone platforming going forward, I suppose?

Although it was still Delphically non-committal, markets heard this as an Odysseus-like pledge by the central bankers to bind themselves to lower rates for longer. Whether any central bank would truly tie itself to the mast is doubtful; but the theory, as told by Paul Krugman, who won the Nobel prize in 2008, was to “credibly promise to be irresponsible”.

We're definitely hitting all the Greek stuff. It's like there's some Odysseuan movie out, or something. #1533833

"Mr Warsh’s instinct to say less is understandable in light of such failures. It starts from humility.""Mr Warsh’s instinct to say less is understandable in light of such failures. It starts from humility."

The Fed is not all-knowing and the price-discovering financial markets are, in his words, a “very accomplished economist”. But prices, in this case, are not signals from the gods. They reflect guesses about what the Fed will do—plus, for now, a risk premium on Mr Warsh’s untested stewardship. [...] humble speech is not enough to impress markets. Above all, the speaker needs to be trusted.

By stressing how little the Fed understands, Mr Warsh may be making himself—and the Fed—less credible. For an oracle, it is not enough to know thyself

archive: https://archive.md/yqWul